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"Ask ten different scientists about the environment, population control, genetics, and you'll get ten different answers, but there's one thing every scientist o

"Ask ten different scientists about the environment, population control, genetics, and you'll get ten different answers, but there's one thing every scientist on the planet agrees on. Whether it happens in a hundred years or a thousand years or a million years, eventually our Sun will grow cold and go out. When that happens, it won't just take us. It'll take Marilyn Monroe, and Lao-Tzu, and Einstein, and Morobuto, and Buddy Holly, and Aristophanes, and - all of this - all of this - was for nothing. Unless we go to the stars." While that quote is intentionally more poetry than science (it's from Babylon 5) it reflects a kernel of the truth. Right now, we have all of our eggs in one basket. We must act with great care toward that basket, surely. But we should also strive as a species to see that there is more than one basket. Mars is the first baby step toward the stars, and we should go to the stars.

bmitc 3y ago
That is overly sentimental and romantic and doesn't match reality. The effort to sustain life on Mars is more than we know, and it is much, much, much, much more effort to sustain life on Mars (even if we knew how to do it) than it is to address our problems here on Earth. And say we go to Mars, which we can basically simulate here on Earth anyway. How does that get us closer "to the stars"? If we can't survive here on Earth, literally the most perfect habitat for us, then what in the world is the point of "going to the stars", whatever that means in the first place? What are we going to do there? Destroy whatever secondary Earth we find? What physics is there to say that we can even get to another solar system before we destroy the habitability of the Earth? We can "go to the stars" without sending man out first. I still see no current reason to send humans to Mars other than to waste resources. > Whether it happens in a hundred years or a thousand years or a million years, eventually our Sun will grow cold and go out. Yea, and that's a minimum of 400-500 million years out, and it's going to get a lot hotter before it goes cold. And umpteen million other things on Earth, such as the geological structure, will have drastically changed by then. You shouldn't act like humanity actually has the ability to effectively worry about such a date when we can't even do most stuff today with any longer than a year or two horizon. The likelihood of disaster, such as asteroid or meteor impact or a Venus-type situation or other ecosystem collapse scenarios, before the Sun exhausts itself is basically 99.<however many 9s you want>%. Going to Mars doesn't give us anymore data on how to escape the Sun's evolution. And I highly question any claim that humanity even has the ability to be an interstellar species, which is a separate question from capability.
bayindirh 3y ago
I'm perfectly fine with vaporizing when our Sun decides to go supernova on us. Who are we? Just a species which won evolutionary lottery in one way or another and dominate a planet with what we do best. Exploring what's out there is exciting, yes, but if we're going to ruin everywhere like our pale blue dot, I think it's for greater good that we go extinct on this marble.

bmitc 3y ago

That is overly sentimental and romantic and doesn't match reality. The effort to sustain life on Mars is more than we know, and it is much, much, much, much more effort to sustain life on Mars (even if we knew how to do it) than it is to address our problems here on Earth. And say we go to Mars, which we can basically simulate here on Earth anyway. How does that get us closer "to the stars"? If we can't survive here on Earth, literally the most perfect habitat for us, then what in the world is the point of "going to the stars", whatever that means in the first place? What are we going to do there? Destroy whatever secondary Earth we find? What physics is there to say that we can even get to another solar system before we destroy the habitability of the Earth? We can "go to the stars" without sending man out first. I still see no current reason to send humans to Mars other than to waste resources. > Whether it happens in a hundred years or a thousand years or a million years, eventually our Sun will grow cold and go out. Yea, and that's a minimum of 400-500 million years out, and it's going to get a lot hotter before it goes cold. And umpteen million other things on Earth, such as the geological structure, will have drastically changed by then. You shouldn't act like humanity actually has the ability to effectively worry about such a date when we can't even do most stuff today with any longer than a year or two horizon. The likelihood of disaster, such as asteroid or meteor impact or a Venus-type situation or other ecosystem collapse scenarios, before the Sun exhausts itself is basically 99.<however many 9s you want>%. Going to Mars doesn't give us anymore data on how to escape the Sun's evolution. And I highly question any claim that humanity even has the ability to be an interstellar species, which is a separate question from capability.

bayindirh 3y ago

I'm perfectly fine with vaporizing when our Sun decides to go supernova on us. Who are we? Just a species which won evolutionary lottery in one way or another and dominate a planet with what we do best. Exploring what's out there is exciting, yes, but if we're going to ruin everywhere like our pale blue dot, I think it's for greater good that we go extinct on this marble.